The poem "Musée des beaux arts" by W.H. Auden was written as a response to Pieter Brueghel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus".
In this poem, Auden alludes to the human indiference towards other people's misfortune.
In the first section of the poem, Auden shows how humans go around not caring and paying little attention to the suffering in the world. According to Auden, neither children nor animals have enough sympathy to understand someone else's plight. But adults remain uninterested in individual calamity.
In the second section of the poem, Auden refers to Brueghel's paiting, by describing specific images of this dismissal of external suffering. How the ploughman "<em>may</em>" have heard the splash and how, for him, it was not an important failure.
